Test PHP 7 with Vagrant

The PHP core team have set themselves a deadline. They've publicly stated PHP 7 will be launched in October. While this does not feel like a remarkable thing, it still pushes the work forward like any other deadline out there.

Some Open Source projects are notorious for not hitting (or even setting) deadlines. With competition from HHVM (Symfony LTS recently reached 100% support for HHVM) and the PHP 6 that never happened, it looks like the PHP team is taking this launch seriously.

The thing is that in order for the launch to be successful the apps running on PHP need to work with version 7. It is your job as a developer to make this happen by starting to test your applications today. To get you on your way in Rasmus Lerdorf has created a php7dev Vagrant box image for testing PHP.

If you're familiar with Vagrant and VirtualBox then getting up-to-speed is as easy as 1-2-3: